Jessica, Jim and Victoria Harvey, Chief Legal Officer at Smile Brands, Inc., dive into the complexities of reporting structures for General Counsels (GCs), discussing the pros and cons of reporting to CEOs versus CFOs, and the broader impacts on a legal department's influence within an organization.

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 Once when you're reporting to the CEO, you're setting the tone that you're also a strategic partner. You're bringing more to the table, and you're not just a compliance officer, although that is also part of my function. But you are there to help drive the business. You are part of the executive team. You're making the decisions to grow the business.

 You always have to stay humble. And I can tell you, even though I've been with the company for a long period of time, whenever we have a new executive joining or someone else on my team joining, I'm always open to new ideas. Just because you've been doingcertain things a certain way, you need different perspectives. I think in your career, no matter what level you get to, you always have to be humble and respectful and listen to others' perspectives because your way may not be the only way to be doing something.

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04:30 - Victoria’s journey

06:07 - Topic of the day

20:13 - Tactics for gaining influence

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Ken, Jessica, and Jenny Hamilton, CLO of Exterro, discuss AI’s potential in the legal profession. They dive into their favorite tools and how to apply them, as well as the importance of human oversight to ensure accuracy and compliance. Jenny also shares strategies for driving adoption within her team and making sure new tech meets the needs of her team.

Tune in to hear personal experiences, practical insights, and expert opinions on AI’s transformative potential and its challenges in legal.

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02:20 - About Ken

03:49 - About Jenny and Exterro

05:05 - What’s exciting, what’s scary about AI?

09:28 - Helpful tools

17:58 - Driving adoption

23:23 - How to be a new adopter

26:18 - Advice for entry level associates

37:39 - How AI disrupts the law firm model

46:25 - Keep or redline

49:46 - Final takeaways

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Sandy MacDonnell, Head of Legal Ops at DocuSign, and Krysta Johnson, Senior Legal Ops Evangelist at DocuSign, highlight the importance of metrics, data, and AI in transforming the legal profession from cost center to strategic, growth-oriented role. Sandy and Krysta both stress the need for adaptability at a time of rapid tech changes, as well as best practices for implementing new legal technologies.

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SANDY:  I think this is true about the rest of the industry as well, is that, you know, it's really seeing legal and putting legal in that more strategic kind of role and being that partner to the business, and being that department of yes and like, how does the legal team help our sales team sell more, not just tell them how they can't do things. So I think that's been a really fun evolution of, of the legal operations function. Um, and I'm just excited because I think it's opening up a lot of career opportunities for folks who've been in these types of roles. It's much more creative, much more kind of fun and, like forward looking, I guess I would say.

SANDY:  I think if there's anything I've learned in legal operations, it's like things change all the time, right? You had like one thing you were running towards and the next day the GCs like, Hey, actually I wanna go chase this other thing. Being flexible, being, uh, adaptable, continuously learning, right?

Like in this world today that we're living in with ai, we're seeing, you know, like the legal landscape always changed quickly when I think about technology. But today it's changing so much more rapidly. So if you have some, you know, if you're hiring someone to do legal operations for you, that person better be super excited about change, about, you know, learning the new technologies, what's coming down the line, how are we gonna reshape our department to, to adopt those new technologies. Just so essential.

KRYSTA:   We operate currently in most of the corporate world, in these very, somewhat isolated silos. Yes, there's some cross-functional collaboration, but I think the idea of these silos is what really kind of stifles a lot of change that could move a lot faster.

And I think we're going to see more centralized operations functions where there might be a, like dedicated people that support legal operations, but they will sit in a more dedicated operations function under say, the COO versus sitting within the legal team. As you said, Sandy, like there is a lot of democratizing of technology and like ability to educate yourself.

And I think just like we've seen changes in the past 20 years in the legal, like the legal field itself, we, we'll see that change in operations as well where you, you don't have people doing a lot of the more menial work.

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